Forgotten, As A Dream
by Clodius Pulcher
Summary: "They'll be back. They're never far away..." Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, aged eleven and a half, dreams red. Or rather, Red.


**FORGOTTEN, AS A DREAM**

**~o~O~o~**

The trouble with _not remembering _things, as opposed to simply forgetting them, is the way memories surface deep in the dark, like kraken from the abyssal sea.

Very much like the kraken, actually. Vast, ancient and terrible: a primordial impulse rising from the depths of human nature, picking up the detritus of humanity on the way. And, not to put too fine a point on it, angry as hell.

Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, aged eleven and a half, dreamed red.

**~o~O~o~**

Red in tooth and toenail. Stiletto heels struck the floor as though they had a grudge against it. She stalked out of an uneasy, blood-filled night, the woman with the copper hair, and towered over Pepper, dreaming, so that Pepper found herself blinking up at long bronze legs that had been twenty-five since the world was young and would never know the meaning of varicose veins.

And all of her bronze, all the smooth skin sheathed in oxblood leather that Pepper could not precisely recall, because it was dream and details slip away from you in dreams, 'specially dreams about things you're not meant to remember...

_Little girl,_ said the woman, _little girl with your little wooden sword, _let me out_._

**~o~O~o~**

Dawn beating down the curtains woke Pepper.

She didn't remember the dream all day.

**~o~O~o~**

The woman was waiting for her when she closed her eyes.

She was sitting sideways on a chair, a red dream-chair in a red dream-world, her long legs crossed so that light sliced in glimmering slivers along a stiletto's upturned edge. The scarlet smile that stretched her mouth was about as good-humoured as a cat looking at a hamster from the wrong side of the cage door.

Pepper couldn't hear anything the woman said. She knew what the woman was saying anyway.

_Little girls and little boys playing games... with fire. Ha! I'll give you fire! I'll set the bloody world alight..._

I'm not little, Pepper wanted to say, I'm almost _twelve_. That's practic'ly _grownup_.

Huh.

_... make-believe swords and grass crowns... kid's toys... silly little games..._

It faded into an indistinct, angry roar somewhere in the rising, reddish dark.

**~o~O~o~**

Wensleydale was a fastidious eater. Normally.

Today he gobbled down his lunch as if he hadn't eaten since the weekend.

Pepper watched him owlishly. "Sleep well?" she said at last.

He gave her a blank look. "I... don't remember."

**~o~O~o~**

_I'm telling you,_ _this head's not big enough for two, _said the woman._ And anyway, _and now her orange eyes narrowed, _I don't like sharing._

She prowled through the red shadows like a lion in a hamster cage: lithe, dangerous and cornered. Her chair had already faded to a mere detail. The tang of iron lingered in Pepper's mouth, even though she was pretty sure she was dreaming.

It's _my_ head, Pepper should have said. What're you doin' here, anyway?

_Doing?_

That was explosive. The woman swung round in a copper swirl, her hair glinting all the way down to her waist. What she said came out as a series of detonations, each word a landmine going off beneath some unwary traveller.

_Waiting,_ she said, advancing on Pepper one leonine stride at a time, her heels leaving gashes bleeding in the red dream-floor, _for a little girl with a little wooden sword to let me out of her little head!_

**~o~O~o~**

There was no other word for it. Brian looked _clean_.

"So?" he said defensively. "Nothin' wrong with that, is there? Don't know any laws about _not _bein' clean."

But afterwards he admitted he'd woken up feeling so sticky he'd got straight out of bed and had a bath without even being prompted. A _long_ bath. Involving _soap_.

Pepper's head filled up with half-remembered echoes. She shivered.

**~o~O~o~**

In the dark of the dream, the woman blazed like a petrol fire: her hair, her eyes, the burnished bronze of her leather-sheathed skin.

_You kids_, she said. _You kids with your wooden swords, your silly games. I'll give you swords!_

She smelled like fire too. Pepper backed away.

_You love me,_ _all of you, all you kids playing with your little toys. And I have better toys, I have real swords and real guns. Men love me, _the woman said, _young men and men with wives and old men too, and men who should know better, men with countries and families and lovers._ Her voice was a purr now, the deep and dangerous sort that could turn into a growl at any moment. _I know about men. And I know _all _about kids. And little girls should stay out of my way!_

Huh, Pepper didn't say, and probably couldn't have said it anyway because her throat was full of smoke and if she backed away any faster she'd start running, which she wasn't going to do, not in her own dream, that's _sexism_, that is. _And _you're a girl. My mother says that's internalised misogyny and women using the oppressive language they've been taught by society against fellow victims of the patriarchy just 'cos they don't know any better.

The woman's purr dropped another notch, like tyres settling into smouldering rubber on a bonfire.

_Yeah, _she said, _well, I am not a feminist. __Bad things happen to women around me, and little girls and little boys, unless they've got guns. I like the strong and the cunning and the well-armed... but I can make you fall in love with me, little girl..._

The heat-haze shimmer surrounding her flared up against the reddish dark. Pepper was suddenly aware of the woman's clothes clinging in all the right places, plus several others technically banned under the Geneva Convention.**[1]** For a moment, the roller coaster of Life seemed inclined to develop new and rather surprising curves.

... _I can give you better toys, _the woman was saying, real _ones... and better games..._

**~o~O~o~**

That afternoon, Pepper found herself looking for scarlet lipstick along with her plain cover copy of _Just Seventeen_ and couldn't remember why.

She got it anyway.

**~o~O~o~**

'_Where they belong',_ said the woman with the copper hair, and said it bitterly, as though someone else had said it first and she didn't like it in the slightest. Her mouth curled into a scarlet sneer. _It's all right for _some_. 'The minds of men'! Sure, some big strong chaps, a mob of freedom fighters with a decent armoury, maybe the odd rocket-launcher and a secret base, not some little girl with a wooden sword and a bit of a temper..._

Her teeth glistened white as exposed bone. She leaned forwards.

_You tell Him from me,_ she hissed, _if I'm not out of your head by the end of the week, there's going to be Trouble_.

**~o~O~o~**

It was thundering in London and a damp fog skulked beyond the motorway, but the skies over Lower Tadfield remained resolutely blue and the abandoned trolleys and corrugated iron sheets that filled the quarry glowed in the August sunshine.**[2]**

"'S funny," said Brian, slowly, because whatever he wanted to say seemed to be giving him some trouble in the thinking department. "I was goin' to tell Adam something. Only, I can't remember what..."

Pepper shifted uneasily. Wensleydale was polishing his black-rimmed spectacles in a way that suggested something was worrying him, but he wasn't going to say anything because it didn't make any sense.

"... was talkin' to someone, he was wearin' all white, I can't remember his name..."

His voice trailed uncertainly away into the summer afternoon.

It was a moment before Adam stirred on his milk crate throne. A shaft of sunlight caught his curls and burnished his face momentarily to a startling brilliance.

"Shouldn't think it matters," he said. "Not if you can't remember it. Prob'ly not very important, in _that_ case. Prob'ly best to forget all about it."

His eyes glinted. "Still," he added, "if you meet 'em again, I s'pose you might tell 'em I'll give it a thought. If they ask nicely."

**~o~O~o~**

**[1]** Henri Dunant had met a red-haired woman called Scarlett admiring her handiwork at Solferino and incidentally inspiring a whole new fashion in footwear among Napoleon's courtiers, although their general preference for heels that were only metaphorically knives had been rather disappointing.

**[2]** Wensleydale's parents had once taken him on holiday to the Westcountry in August and regretted it. One day, the Them would be exposed to the multifarious wonders of the true British climate, such as nationwide flooding in June and snow at Easter and that dull grey rain that just keeps on falling out of the sky without any int'restin' thunder or lightning or _anything_; and that day, when it came, would be a nasty shock.


End file.
